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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, leave it to Namecheap to fuck up extremely simple UX. Instead of just giving me a toggle in the domain settings, I have to add WhoisGuard to my cart, once per domain (for the tens of domains I own), then go and select "10 years" in the purchasing screen (and wait for the entire page to reload) once for each domain, and then go through the entire checkout process to pay $0.

Why not just let me click a single button, Namecheap?

I wish a new registrar would come in with good service and UX and eat every other registrar's lunch. There aren't any registrars that easily let me manage my domains without trying to sell me tons of stuff every time I need to make a simple change. I've switched to Cloudflare for DNS because their UI is no-nonsense, I half wish they just sold me the domain as well.

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This is coming on our next iteration and WhoisGuard will simply be feature in the future.

That's good to hear, thank you. I was half-afraid that the UX was left like this so it would be easy to roll back.

And while you're at it, I hope you'll automatically post account credits to pending charges. Previously, I've had to go through an obscure laborious process to apply credits Namecheap gave me. If you don't want people to use their account credits, don't offer them.

Maybe, as a first shot, they decided to favour near-instant implementation over usability by simply setting the price for an existing product to $0 and use the existing checkout flow.

Maybe, but it would have been equally as instant to just set all domains as "WhoisGuard purchased until the year 3000" in the database, and much more user-friendly.

No, I don't want WhoisGuard.

Why not?

If you're registering as a business rather than an individual it looks dodgy to have a whois privacy record instead of your business details. Not necessarily a deal breaker but definitely a single red flag

(Not the OP.)

Because whois, along with the many people who scrape it, provide a public record of my domain ownership. With privacy protection it is a lot harder to prove ownership if the registrar makes a balls up.

"Purchased" isn't the same as "enabled". It just gives you the button on the UI.

I actually switched to Namecheap because the UI/UX design was so much better than my previous registrar: IrishHosting

You might be able to see room for improvement but they're better than 90% of the other registrars.

Yeah, but that's more or less my point: The bar is so low...

I used to have many domains at NameCheap and left after their redesign a couple of years ago. Huge spacing, many clicks to get to any information, and good luck trying to update multiple domains. Seems like they wanted to alienate their pro/bulk users in favor of the buy-a-one-page-website crowd.

Route53 (using now) just makes more sense: easy programmatic access, unified billing with other services, included domain privacy, and no games with renewal pricing/discounts.

Same here. I've moved everything to uniregistry from namecheap. It was such a headache moving domains, I wouldn't use namecheap again... even with free whoisguard. And inexplicably some of my domains that were using whoisguard had their email contact information changed, without my knowledge, to "legal@namecheap.com" meaning that I wouldn't receive any confirmation emails. What a mess.

Take a look at Porkbun (https://porkbun.com/). I've been pleased with their service. Free WHOIS + software token-based 2FA.

Have you given Google's name service a try? Regardless of all the privacy stuff and etc going on in HN, their product is really nice.

That's interesting, I'll take a look, although I don't like using Google services. Thanks for the suggestion, I wasn't even aware that they had a domain registration product.

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